5

Socialism is an intellectual Proteus, but to the men of my

generation it came as the revolt of the workers. Rodbertus we never

heard of and the Fabian Society we did not understand; Marx and

Morris, the Chicago Anarchists, JUSTICE and Social Democratic

Federation (as it was then) presented socialism to our minds.

Hatherleigh was the leading exponent of the new doctrines in

Trinity, and the figure upon his wall of a huge-muscled, black-

haired toiler swaggering sledgehammer in hand across a revolutionary

barricade, seemed the quintessence of what he had to expound.

Landlord and capitalist had robbed and enslaved the workers, and

were driving them quite automatically to inevitable insurrection.

They would arise and the capitalist system would flee and vanish

like the mists before the morning, like the dews before the sunrise,

giving place in the most simple and obvious manner to an era of

Right and Justice and Virtue and Well Being, and in short a

Perfectly Splendid Time.

I had already discussed this sort of socialism under the guidance of

Britten, before I went up to Cambridge. It was all mixed up with

ideas about freedom and natural virtue and a great scorn for kings,

titles, wealth and officials, and it was symbolised by the red ties

we wore. Our simple verdict on existing arrangements was that they

were "all wrong." The rich were robbers and knew it, kings and

princes were usurpers and knew it, religious teachers were impostors

in league with power, the economic system was an elaborate plot on

the part of the few to expropriate the many. We went about feeling

scornful of all the current forms of life, forms that esteemed

themselves solid, that were, we knew, no more than shapes painted on

a curtain that was presently to be torn aside…

It was Hatherleigh's poster and his capacity for overstating things,

I think, that first qualified my simple revolutionary enthusiasm.

Perhaps also I had met with Fabian publications, but if I did I

forget the circumstances. And no doubt my innate constructiveness

with its practical corollary of an analytical treatment of the

material supplied, was bound to push me on beyond this melodramatic

interpretation of human affairs.

I compared that Working Man of the poster with any sort of working

man I knew. I perceived that the latter was not going to change,

and indeed could not under any stimulus whatever be expected to

change, into the former. It crept into my mind as slowly and surely

as the dawn creeps into a room that the former was not, as I had at

first rather glibly assumed, an "ideal," but a complete

misrepresentation of the quality and possibilities of things.

I do not know now whether it was during my school-days or at

Cambridge that I first began not merely to see the world as a great

contrast of rich and poor, but to feel the massive effect of that

multitudinous majority of people who toil continually, who are for

ever anxious about ways and means, who are restricted, ill clothed,

ill fed and ill housed, who have limited outlooks and continually

suffer misadventures, hardships and distresses through the want of

money. My lot had fallen upon the fringe of the possessing

minority; if I did not know the want of necessities I knew

shabbiness, and the world that let me go on to a university

education intimated very plainly that there was not a thing beyond

the primary needs that my stimulated imagination might demand that

it would not be an effort for me to secure. A certain aggressive

radicalism against the ruling and propertied classes followed almost

naturally from my circumstances. It did not at first connect itself

at all with the perception of a planless disorder in human affairs

that had been forced upon me by the atmosphere of my upbringing, nor

did it link me in sympathy with any of the profounder realities of

poverty. It was a personal independent thing. The dingier people

one saw in the back streets and lower quarters of Bromstead and

Penge, the drift of dirty children, ragged old women, street

loafers, grimy workers that made the social background of London,

the stories one heard of privation and sweating, only joined up very

slowly with the general propositions I was making about life. We

could become splendidly eloquent about the social revolution and the

triumph of the Proletariat after the Class war, and it was only by a

sort of inspiration that it came to me that my bedder, a garrulous

old thing with a dusty black bonnet over one eye and an

ostentatiously clean apron outside the dark mysteries that clothed

her, or the cheeky little ruffians who yelled papers about the

streets, were really material to such questions.

Directly any of us young socialists of Trinity found ourselves in

immediate contact with servants or cadgers or gyps or bedders or